


Covert Ops

by persnickett



Series: Covert Ops [1]
Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Community: sexy_right, M/M, POV Outsider, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:47:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a moment Jack thinks she’s going to pretend she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Like it hasn’t been completely obvious all afternoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Covert Ops

“Do you think he knows? Or is he as good at picking up on social cues as most computer geeks?”

Lucy turns to look at him, and for a moment Jack thinks she’s going to pretend she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Like it hasn’t been completely obvious all afternoon.

But then she turns and lets her gaze follow his through the sliding glass doors to the kitchen, where their father’s ‘room mate’ is up to his elbows in dish suds – and from the looks of it, refusing to let it interrupt his dinner table rant about the Alberta oil sands and Bristol Palin’s boob job.

“Sometimes I’m not even convinced _Dad_ knows,” Lucy says wryly.

Her eye is on John, standing next to Matt and scraping their plates over the trash. He’s listening to him ramble and smiling a fondly smug smile to himself that looks a lot like the one he’d worn at Chernobyl, when Jack slipped up and forgot to call him by his first name. 

“So he’s ‘dad’ again, now?”

“You mean you didn’t get the ‘don’t call me John’ lecture?” 

Lucy cocks an eyebrow at him and reaches for her drink, slides her fingers around the edge of the sweating glass. He wonders when she started getting manicures.

“At least once,” Jack admits, bringing his own glass up to his lips. “…It’s a work in progress.”

Lucy just smiles knowingly. 

“Look, can we focus on the massive internal crisis I’m having?” he says, jerking his chin at the scene in the kitchen. John is dumping a stack of plates into the sink with a carelessness that looks suspiciously deliberate. The resulting splash makes a lot of sudsy dishwater end up on Matt’s t-shirt. Matt’s mouth appears to finally stop moving, and John’s smug smirk gets a little smugger. “I mean I…like it’s fine, I’m cool and everything…”

“You’re so not cool,” Lucy laughs, and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear with her glamourous-looking fingers. “It’s okay, I wasn’t at first either.”

That’s bullshit. If his big sister has ever been anything, she was always cool. Even back in the days when her nail polish was chipped and she wore those big oversized hoop earrings and chewed her gum way too loud. 

Lucy was always the worldly, experienced one. It was no surprise to him that she could sit here, in the cooling evening breeze, taking this whole thing in stride. 

The bright spot of being burned had definitely been stepping down onto that blazing hot tarmac, and seeing Lucy waiting on it – his arm around her shoulders and her sun-warmed hair against his cheek told him like nothing else ever could that he’d come home. 

He didn’t know until it was over, just how much he had missed her. 

“How long has it been, do you think?” 

Lucy sips her drink pensively.

“For Matt, I think it was probably at first sight,” she says, slowly. “But then for a brainy type, Matt’s…well let’s just say it might surprise you how much he’s basically ruled by his hormones.”

“I don’t even want to know how you know that.”

“You really, really don’t.” Lucy shakes her head with a rueful smile, and thankfully leaves it at that. “For Dad…it’s hard to say. You know what he’s like.”

Jack isn’t at all sure that he does. They’re both watching what’s happening in the kitchen, now. John appears to have tossed a dish towel at Matt. Right over his head.

“Is it wrong that I’m wondering if this is why? You know, that this –” Jack gestures toward the glass doors with the drink in his hand. “…Could be the reason? For everything?” Maybe it’s the booze, maybe it’s some kind of nostalgia effect of this sudden family reunion, but he keeps on getting these weird feelings, like he’s about twelve years old again. “All the fights, all the late nights at work. The year that mom brought that Richard guy to Thanksgiving dinner who turned out to be a family therapist. …Am I wrong to think my entire existence is more or less the product of a lie?”

Lucy is just watching him, waiting for him to finish regressing before she responds.

“He loved Mom, you dingus,” she says, looking back into the kitchen again. “More than anything. Don’t you remember that thing at the airport?”

“Too little,” Jack responds, after a sip. The ice cubes are starting to melt and water it down. “It was only ever a story. Like most of my memories of Dad. I was still in the first grade when he moved back to New York, and by then they didn’t even bother to fight anymore.” 

If Lucy heard him slip up again, she doesn’t mention it. She’s still watching what’s unfolding on the other side of the glass.

“I feel like I don’t even know what John loving somebody _looks_ like,” he says, finally.

 

John is elbowing Matt away from the sink so he can take over dish detail, telling him something that looks like ‘you’ve done enough’. Matt offers some sort of protest, but ends up shrugging and wandering out of the kitchen – likely to go and change his sodden shirt. 

“It looks exactly like that,” Lucy says.

John is alone in the kitchen now, but that fond, private little smile is still there. He starts to whistle while he scrubs, and it’s loud enough for them to hear out on the patio.

They warn you about the isolation when you sign on for the job. There’s a whole psych evaluation just to see if they think you can handle it. What they don’t warn you about is how hard it is to come back, after. The regret.

On some level he knew Lucy had grown up while he was away. Hell, he’d done his share of growing himself. But Lucy was this smart, sophisticated _woman_ now. And he’d missed how it happened. 

Kind of like the way John had missed how it had happened for Jack. 

This family has seen enough regret. He sighs. “Would it be good, do you think?”

Lucy doesn’t answer right away. She’s still watching John. 

“Yeah,” she says finally, nodding. “I do think.”

He joins her in watching their father looking incongruously happy and domestic for a minute.

Jack takes another sip for courage, swallows slowly. He needs it for what he’s about to say next.

“What are you doing Friday?” Lucy’s gaze snaps to his face now. She could have made a killing in the CIA; she’s always known when he was up to something.

“I’ll take John,” Jack says. “You’re assigned to Matt. On Friday night I’ll get him out of the house. You find an excuse to show up here and then…well, just make sure he’s prepared.”

“Prepared,” Lucy repeats.

“For John to come home seeing your ex-boyfriend and his hormones in a whole new light.” Jack says, draining his glass. “…And probably a little bit drunk.”

When he gets the balls to look her in the eye again, the smile on Lucy’s face is only mockingly skeptical. 

“Only a little bit?”

“Okay possibly a _lot_ drunk. …You might want to be out of here before it happens.”

“Noted,” Lucy says, with a familiar-looking smirk. 

“So Friday. You in?”

Lucy raises her glass to him, and drains her drink to the last, too. 

“It’s a date,” she says.

Jack gives her a nod of agreement, and gets up to take their empty glasses in to John and his dish towel.

They could only hope.


End file.
